Election too close to call, poll suggests

Ontario voters look set to elect another minority government in an election next Thursday that is too close to call

Ontario voters look set to elect another minority government in an election next Thursday that is too close to call.

A new Forum Research poll suggests the only wildcard is whether the administration will again be led by Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne or by Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak.

According the survey, the Liberals lead with 39 per cent to 37 per cent for the Conservatives while Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats are at 17 per cent and Mike Schreiner’s Greens are at 6 per cent.

“It’s very, very close. We’re in the ninth inning,” Forum president Lorne Bozinoff said Friday.

“The debate was supposed to the big home run, but hardly anyone got anything out of it,” said Bozinoff, referring to Tuesday’s province-wide broadcast.

“Tim Hudak seems to have won the debate, but his support didn’t go up. Maybe he was the best debater but it doesn’t mean people liked him,” he said.

In last week’s Forum poll the Tories and Liberals were tied at 36 per cent with the NDP at 20 per cent and the Greens at 7 per cent.

Using interactive voice-response phone calls, the pollster surveyed 1,022 people across Ontario on Thursday and results are considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The latest poll was taken at the same time news broke that former premier Dalton McGuinty was interviewed in April by Ontario Provincial Police detectives probing the Liberals’ gas plants debacle.

Police say McGuinty, who has denied any wrongdoing, is not being investigated and is helping them determine whether documents related to the cancellation of Oakville and Mississauga power plants were deleted in his office.

Bozinoff said it is difficult to say what, if any, impact the revelation will have next Thursday.

“It really depends on how it gets treated by the media. People get bored with this stuff so it has to be something dramatically new to really have an impact (in polls),” he said, adding the Tories and NDP may have milked a controversy dating back to 2011.

The pollster extrapolated this week’s regional results to project a narrow Liberal majority of 57 seats in the 107-member legislature (up from 50 last week) to 39 Tories (down from 42) and 11 for the NDP (down from 15).

That’s because the Liberals traditionally have the most efficient vote, winning by narrow margins in Ontario’s many urban ridings while the Conservatives run up large pluralities in fewer rural constituencies.

Still, Bozinoff emphasized that “the most likely outcome is a minority government.”

“We really could see something like the results we saw in the last election,” he said.

At dissolution, the minority Liberals held 48 seats, including Speaker Dave Levac, the Tories had 37, the NDP 21, and there was one vacancy.

Bozinoff said the clues can be found be in where the leaders’ tours are going in the final dash to Election Day.

With that in mind, Forum surveyed 18 key ridings for the Star, using local candidates’ names.

“The riding polls are good bellwethers — they tell us what’s going to happen,” said Bozinoff, noting the parties rely on them to gauge where to campaign far more than upon province-wide polls.

“If the leaders have to go to their strongholds they’re in trouble,” he said.

In the battlegrounds Forum surveyed it appeared there are Liberal, Conservative, and New Democratic incumbents in dogfights.

Liberal ministers Bob Chiarelli (Ottawa West-Nepean) and Teresa Piruzza (Windsor West) appear to be losing — Chiarelli to a Tory and Piruzza to a New Democrat.

Grit backbencher Grant Crack is also trailing a Conservative challenger in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.

But Tories Doug Holyday (Etobicoke-Lakeshore), Jane McKenna (Burlington) and Rob Leone (Cambridge) are also facing uphill fights with Liberals ahead of all of them.

The worst news may be for the New Democrats, whose vote appears to be collapsing as progressive voters and many unionized workers, fearing a Tory majority, rally to the Liberals to prevent that.

There is some solace for New Democrats: Wayne Gates, who won a February byelection squeaker, looks like he will hang on.

The polls are weighted statistically to ensure the sample reflects the actual population according to the latest census data. The weighting formula has been shared with the Star and raw polling results are housed at the University of Toronto’s political science department’s data library.